University of Virginia English students study HBO award-winning series Game of
Thrones as part of their university degree

Students at the University of Virginia can take a four-week course studying the HBO TV seriesGame of Thrones.

The Emmy and Golden Globe-winning Game of Thrones is an adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire, George RR Martin's series of medieval fantasy novels, and now the University of Virginia is offering “a four-week, discussion-based seminar” based on the books and TV series.

The course is run by Associate Professor of the English department, Lisa Woolfork. She is a respected academic, who wrote a book in 2008 called Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture.

Woolfork says: "One of the goals behind this class was to teach students how the skills that we use to study literature are very useful skills for reading literature and TV in conjunction. Game of Thrones is popular, it’s interesting, but it’s also very serious. There are a lot of things in the series that are very weighty, and very meaningful, and can be illuminated through the skills of literary analysis.”

In one class, students discussed “The Red Wedding”, an episode which featured the gruesome killings of one of the series’ main families. The class counts for an English credit.

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Fourth-year English major Madlyn McAuliffe, one of 24 students to study Game of Thrones, believes the course is valuable. She said: “As society progressed, books became the things everybody turned to talk about. But now it’s television and film. It’s so literary – how in-depth it is, how robust it is, how much there is to discuss about it, but we’re also very concerned about the pop culture aspects, how we as viewers receive Game of Thrones. I think it’s important to apply the same principles we do with literature to television and film, and that’s determined a lot of the English courses I’ve taken.”

Students discuss Game of Thrones. Pic: University of Virginia/Sanjay Suchak

The class culminates with a group-based creative project, where students had to come up with their own way to write a new chapter in the fantasy saga.

“All of them have to connect in some way to how Game of Thrones has sustained itself as a cultural phenomenon,” Woolfork said. “Some are writing a prequel graphic novel; others are working on spoilers … I want them to consider, ‘How do you track the progress of a book to a TV series to this large phenomena, and how does that transform?’ Literarily speaking, it’s very diverse and rich text. It has lots of layers, lots of characters, and it’s very smart.”